"Say something to me"—Augustine gasped on.—"You did that for him, too.—I am his child.—You are not my mother.—" He could not sob.
Amabel gazed at him. With the unimaginable revelation of his love came the unimaginable turning of the sword; it was this that she must destroy. She commanded herself to inflict, swiftly, the further blow.
"Augustine," she said.
He lifted a blind face, hearing her voice. He opened his eyes. They looked at each other.
"I am your mother," said Amabel.
He gazed at her. He gazed and gazed; and she offered herself to the crucifixion of his transfixing eyes.
The silence grew long. It had done its work. Once more she put her hands before her face. "Listen," she said. "I will tell you."
He did not stir nor move his eyes from her hidden face while she spoke. Swiftly, clearly, monotonously, she told him all. She paused at nothing; she slurred nothing. She read him the story of the stupid sinner from the long closed book of the past. There was no hesitation for a word; no uncertainty for an interpretation. Everything was written clearly and she had only to read it out. And while she spoke, of her girlhood, her marriage, of the man with the unknown name—his father—of her flight with him, her flight from him, here, to this house, Augustine sat motionless. His eyes considered her, fixed in their contemplation.
She told him of his own coming, of her brother's anger and dismay, of Sir Hugh's magnanimity, and of how he had been born to her, her child, the unfortunate one, whom she had felt unworthy to love as a child should be loved. She told him how her sin had shut him away and made strangeness grow between them.
And when all this was told Amabel put down her hands. His stillness had grown uncanny: he might not have been there; she might have been talking in an empty room. But he was there, sitting opposite her, as she had last seen him, half turned in his seat, fallen together a little as though his breathing were very slight and shallow; and his dilated eyes, strange, deep, fierce, were fixed on her. She shut the sight out with her hands.